I never had someone terribly close to me commit suicide. I knew and liked both Ramez and Dan, but we were not really intimate. And though their choices saddened me, I could somehow understand their torments and their motivations.

My only really sad and uncanny close-friend death experience is this:

When I was twelve, I had a best friend, Caitlin, whose mother was a junkie. Caitlin and I were in the same alternative school. She was willowy and Welsh-looking, with beautiful totally golden wavy hair. I think she was one of my first loves. We would walk around holding hands, we took LSD together, we would sit on each other’s beds drinking lapsang souchong and earl grey all day reading and talking about what we had read. We both read and wrote poetry. Men were wild for her. She had this incredible nymphy body with long limbs and perfectly round not big not small breasts. She gave off the aura of being highly experienced. I think in fact she was. We became punks together. Later she abandoned me quite suddenly when she met a man, a hardline Marxist, who eventually became her husband. I never understood that abandonment, particularly the suddenness of it (as I suppose I never understand *any* abandonments).

In our alternative school was another knockout nymphet, Leila, who had long red hair and am oddly pointy nose. She, at fourteen, had a body like Ava Gardner — totally 40s pinup (she even wore a vintage a-line leopard-print “car coat”). And she *sucked her thumb*; you can imagine what this did to the 30ish Marin County men who pursued, and often got, her. Leila and I had actually known each other for many years. Our mothers were friends, and we all used to go Sufi dancing together at the Sausalito art center where my mother took metal sculpture classes.

The two gorgeous girls were rivals, on and off, for the attentions of a variety of men. It was a neverending soap opera; existing as I did, between them, I was privy to both of their lamentations and rages over their respective nemeses.

I lost touch with both of them.

Sometime in the early 80s, Caitlin had a brain aneurysm that put her in a coma for some time. She came out of it, but her speech was slurred, her vision was impaired, and she had to walk with a cane. I tried to contact her a couple of times but she never returned my attempts at communication.

I had lost touch with Leila around the same time, but I heard, after I had been in Japan for several years, that Leila had died of a brain tumor.

Then, after a Google search I did last winter, I learned that Caitlin had died of complications resulting from her aneurysm, perhaps a couple of years ago.

Farewell to all that youth, that loveliness, that sex, those passions and convictions.

I don’t think that I have truly “processed” the fact of their deaths. They remain to me now as “figures in the narrative.”

Anyway.

Anyone who has V. Imp. may have noticed that it is dedicated to Leila and Caitlin.

so… gather… ye rosebuds… while… ye may…